3-008-598 - The Print Collector/Heritage Images

The International Exhibition: view of the English Picture-Gallery, looking west, 1862. 'The lower galleries at the two extremities of the building are rather confined, and already heated and close; but the principal galleries are everything that can reasonably be desired. These are certainly the most spacious and stately galleries in the world, not even excepting the long gallery of the Louvre itself. The Pitti and Uffizi at Florence, the galleries of Rome, Naples, Munich, Dresden, and other Continental cities, are, for the most part, divided into small compartments, and lose, therefore, the imposing effect of simple vastness. The apparent size of our own galleries is rather increased by the pale tea-green colour and "flatted" aërial tone of the walls. Anything like monotonousness is prevented by the division of the central entrance, the returning walls of the flanking towers, and in the English gallery the distribution at regular intervals against the walls of pieces of sculpture, before a background of dark maroon-coloured cloth. The "point of station" we have chosen is just within the eastern tower, and the view is looking west towards the arch of the entrance and the continuations of the line of galleries on the foreign side'. From "Illustrated London News", 1862.